Radicalisation and discursive accommodation: responses to rising Euroscepticism in the European Parliament

Abstract

The rise of Euroscepticism has shifted the structure of political conflict in the European Parliament (EP) towards an increasingly dominant pro-/anti-EU divide. Focusing on the hard case of EU enlargement, this article examines changes in MEPs’ discursive and voting patterns over the past two EP mandates. It combines two original datasets containing MEP statements during plenary debates and subsequent roll-call votes to examine the polarisation, cohesion, and consistency of legislative behaviour across different European Political Groups. The findings show that soft Eurosceptics drive a deepening of the pro-/anti-EU divide by radicalising in both discourse and vote to join hard Eurosceptics in their firm rejection of further enlargement. Pro-European MEPs, in contrast, show discursive accommodation of Eurosceptic concerns, with a growing inconsistency between sceptical discourse and continued vote-based support for enlargement-related initiatives. A case study of Turkey illustrates these two mechanisms. The findings shed light on the changing dynamics of political competition in the EP and the impact of rising Euroscepticism upon MEPs’ legislative behaviour.

Keywords:

• European parliament
• Euroscepticism
• EU enlargement
• legislative behaviour
• radicalisation

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Frank Schimmelfennig, Olivier Costa, Miriam Hartlapp, Stefanie Walter, Bjørn Høyland, Edoardo Bressanelli, Dimiter Toshkov and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We categorise the parties based on the score of the eu_pos variable in the CHES dataset (from 1 ‘strongly opposed to EU integration’ to 7 ‘strongly in favour or EU integration’. For each EPG, we calculated a composite score by averaging the eu_pos variable of each MEP of the group at the national level (from the CHES dataset) to create an EU-level variable. According to the CHES codebook, any party that scores under 4 is considered Eurosceptic (3 = somewhat opposed, 2 = opposed, 1 = strongly opposed).

2 Aggregated to the level of party groups, as explained below.

3 See online appendix for an extract from the EBD codebook.

4 https://www.votewatch.eu/

5 Figures A2a and A2b in the online appendix provide a breakdown of the distribution of statements by coalition that includes also conditional statements. We note a shift from dominant support towards more conditional views for the pro-European faction and a change towards a clear dominance of negative statements for Eurosceptics. This is in line with the analysis we included in our main document that excludes conditional statements due to the lack of an equivalent voting position with which we seek to match MEPs’ discourse.

6 Groups vary in size, so the general average at the actors’ level slips from 78% to 52%, which means that support still remains the majority position, but barely so.

7 The calculation for the 8th session includes the position of the Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) group (0.1), which did not exist in the 7^th session and is therefore not represented in the figure.

Additional information

Funding

The manuscript was produced as part of the project ‘Constructing Europe’s Borders: Membership Discourses and European Integration’, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation under grant number 172558. We are grateful to the Programme Hubert Curien – Germaine de Staël under grant number 44535XA for financial support for a French-Swiss research cooperation.

Notes on contributors

Natasha Wunsch

Natasha Wunsch is Professor of European Studies at the University of Fribourg and Assistant Professor of Political Science/European Integration at Sciences Po, Centre d’études européennes et de politique comparée and Senior Researcher at ETH Zurich. [[email protected]]

Marie-Eve Bélanger

Marie-Eve Bélanger is a research and teaching fellow at the University of Geneva and a Senior Researcher in the European Politics Group at ETH Zürich. [[email protected]]